Construction
When placing buildings or infrastructure you have the option of funding the construction from rubles or dollars or simply constructing the building yourself. Constructing the building by yourself is dramatically cheaper. For example it costs about 7350₽ to fund construct of a kindergarten near the soviet border. To purchase the required materials at the border would cost about 724₽: 12t of concrete * 20₽ + 9.3t of gravel * 17₽ + 7.4t of asphalt * 44₽ = 723.7₽ Construction requires 2 types of resources: Workdays and construction materials (Workers & Resources). A work day is the a measure of production equal to how much a single worker could add to the construction in a full day. Some vehicles, like excavators or bulldozers, can "produce" work days themselves without workers being present, while others (e.g. cranes) speed up production but need workers to be present. Workers from residential buildings or public transport stations in walking distance from the construction site will automatically come to work there, and for more distant constructions buses at construction offices will pick up workers at the designated bus stop. Resources come from storage buildings where they can be imported and loaded onto compatible vehicles to transport them to the site, or you can produce them yourself. In the early days of your republic it is generally a good idea to import everything you need (with some exceptions, see below) since most materials are really cheap, and the expensive ones have long production chains, are locked by technology requirements, or need hundreds of workers to produce! You could for example set up a gravel extraction and processing industry early, but especially at harder difficulties, since gravel has so little value, your time and starting money are better spent importing it. To construct buildings on your own you need, at a minimum: *Workers for most buildings, however some constructions, like roads, can be completed entirely by mechanisms at a reduced speed. *A construction office **Dump truck (for transporting gravel & asphalt*) **Open truck (for transporting steel, prefab panels, bricks, and boards) **Concrete* mixer *Open storage *Aggregate storage (You might want to invest in a truck aggregate loading station since the loading speeds of vehicles are based on the building which loads them and the aggregate loading is much faster at that!) *Asphalt plant* *Concrete plant* You don't need to have a self sufficient economy to construct buildings yourself, rather you can import the materials you need at their respective storage buildings. (*Note asphalt and concrete can neither be stored nor imported directly(?) and have to be produced when they are needed because they would set otherwise. However they can be unloaded and stored at the construction site even if construction is not running) In addition you might want: *A warehouse and a covered truck for buildings that require electrical/mechanical components *Crane and/or Excavator to speed up construction *A bus stop for transporting workers to construction sites and buses at the construction office to pick them up Constructing rails is a very similar process, the main difference being that the rail office has internal storage for all the materials it needs, so external storage is not required. The rail construction office also differs from the construction office in that there is only one type of vehicle required, the track builder, and that workers report directly to the rail office instead of to the construction sites themselves.